HTML oddness...

I don't know a whole lot about html, I tend to prefer wysiwyg editors, and mostly just let them get on with it.

However something caught my eye with a site and I'd like to know a little more about what is going on with it.

You'll need Firefox and Opera (I got a recent one of both and it may be version dependant) installed to see what I'm referring to.

If you go to this page:

http://hangsim.com/

and these two sub pages:

http://www.hangsim.com/vs/

http://www.hangsim.com/mf/

You see nothing special at all in Firefox, however visit them with Opera, and you'll see coloured scroll bars.

A long time ago I had windowblinds and a few other bits like it and one thing that could not be done was changing the appearance of scroll bars, well, at least not with out an awful lot of messing about with how windows was set up, much less from within a web page at all.

So how is this being done?

Maybe things in the OS were fixed so it could happen by now and I just nver noticed anyone commenting on it, but I don't know how likely that would be as plenty were saying how much they'd like to do it, I'd imagne there should have been quite a noise once it happened, as there was a great deal of noise from the many asking for it at the time.

I'm much puzzled by this.

Can anyone shed some light on it all?

I knew this, I knew this...

It's CSS, is about all I can remember :/

Some of the the blitzbasic.com themes do this too. ;o)

[edit]
...or at least they did when the pages were using 'Quirks' mode...
[/edit]

I'm *far* from being an expert (or even competent ;o)) with HTML/CSS but you can use something like...

body {
	scrollbar-highlight-color: #9BB6CE;
	scrollbar-track-color: #6084A6;
	scrollbar-base-color: #9BB6CE;
	scrollbar-shadow-color: #9BB6CE;
	scrollbar-face-color: #9BB6CE;
	scrollbar-arrow-color: #ffffff;
	scrollbar-darkshadow-color: #4B6B89;
	scrollbar-3dlight-color: #C1D4E4;
}

[edit]
This wont work if the page uses 'Strict' mode (if the page has a <!DOCTYPE> tag).
[/edit]

you should check the reference on w3c if it is oddness or just a bug that it isn't shown on all browsers.

oh, that's an old hat ^^. it's only working with ie, opera and konqueror. http://de.selfhtml.org/css/eigenschaften/anzeigefenster.htm#scrollbar

there are other oddnesses like this one. e.g. only konqueror and safari do render text-shadows: http://de.selfhtml.org/css/eigenschaften/schrift.htm#text_shadow

(sorry, links to a german html reference... ah, just replace the "de" in the urls with an "en")

Very interesting, I wonder why Firefox does not go there?

Could look quite smart if that were the norm. Sorta helps to tie it all together on a page.

Thanks for the pointers everyone, it's appreciated.

Last I checked, those were non-standard tags Microsoft tossed into IE like half the other crap they just pull out of their....

Regardless, Opera does support it just for the sake of having one-leg up on Microsoft's browser, but it's turned off by default iirc.

For Firefox, nope, no support at all, even though the browser does try to tote that it keeps to the W3C CSS standards..
(that and having sites like that change my browsers looks/mouse icon bug the crap out of me)

[EDIT] Nice knowin Firefox2.0 /still/ doesn't work the Acid2 test. *sigh*.
(screw new features Mozilla, get to work on the memory & CSS standard support/optimizaitons)